The Best Thing

After today's tour of the Cabinet, you'll never look at your kitchen the same way again.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcomed Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I
Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full
of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet

(00:27):
of Curiosities. Some called him brave, others thought he was
willfully ignorant, and most just thought he was mad. Colonel
Robert Johnson didn't care, though. He had a point to
prove and would not be dissuaded. That's why, on September

(00:51):
Johnson set out to do one of the most dangerous
activities in the newly formed United States of America. He
would eat a tomato. Yep, a tomato. Before becoming a
staple in diets worldwide, the tomato was practically anathema to
Europeans at home and in the colonies. However, during the
age of colonization, Europeans pillaged plenty of the America's and

(01:13):
took large quantities of valuables, including food, back to their
home countries. Many of the foods that we've come to
consider European staples today, such as potatoes, and tomatoes originated
in the Americas. The Aztecs were eating tomatoes as early
as seven hundred CE, and likely introduced them to Spanish conquistadores,
who in turn brought them back to Europe. Some new delicacies,

(01:36):
like coo, were greeted with delight. Others, like the potato
and the tomato, were only met with skepticism. The strange
shapes and colors didn't always endear the new foods to
the Europeans. Once most people got over their fear of
the unknown, they cheerfully began incorporating some of these new
ingredients into their cooking. However, some were unwilling to take

(01:57):
indigenous folks word for it, and just i had to
conduct their own studies into whether these plants were healthy
or deadly. One of the earliest references to tomatoes in
European literature was made by Pietro Andrea Mattioli, an Italian
herbalist in the mid fIF hundreds. Pietro described the tomato
as a golden apple and suggested that it was likely

(02:18):
a member of the night shade family, or perhaps some
kind of man drake. From their rumors about tomatoes took
two paths. The first was one that Pietro originally intended
that tomatoes were a mild afrodisiac and therefore a sinful
food and an obstacle to salvation. The second rumor made
tomatoes seemed downright lethal. John Girard, an English herbalist, published

(02:40):
his most well known work, Herbal in fifte. Gerard was
heavily inspired by other herbalists, although he might not have
grasped what he was writing. Gerard plagiarized huge portions of
other herbal books which were already inaccurate, and in short,
created the worst game of telephone to be played in
the sixteen cent to republishing industry. In Gerard's copy and

(03:03):
paste opinion, parts of the tomato plant were highly poisonous.
Some thought that tomatoes were only safe to eat in
warmer climates like meso America, but might make for good
garden ornaments. This attitude prevailed in Britain and British colonies
like New Jersey. I think of this as sort of
like iffy information from a TikTok video, without the ability

(03:23):
to go to a medical doctor or a scientist and
ask them for the facts. Religious fervor than fear of
nasty demise led plenty of people to vilify the tomato.
Even the fruits color seemed to scream danger, the bright,
vivid reds that seemed to allude to lust, danger, and death.
It might seem unusual, and it's easy for us to
joke about the ridiculousness of being afraid of a tomato,

(03:46):
but oddly enough, there seemed to be genuine cases of
people getting sick after eating tomatoes. Of course, it wasn't
the food, it was the tableware. You see. The majority
of the people who could afford to try tomatoes and
were theoretically dying for them, were wealthy people. Unlike poor
folks who had wooden or clay plates and spoons, the
wealthy used pewter, and pewter was a metal with the

(04:08):
specifically high led content that would leach into the food.
Tomatoes are extremely acidic. As it happened, acid brought out
the poison in the pewter and led people to getting sick.
Since no one knew where the poison was really coming from,
the port tomato got the blame. Doctors counseled against consuming
any tomatoes, although some chose to ignore them and survived.

(04:31):
Colonel Robert Johnson was one of those people. He was
disgusted by what he considered gross misinformation and was determined
to prove that tomatoes weren't, in fact dangerous. They were
healthy and delicious. He had been eating them frequently and
hadn't suffered any ill effects. Johnson had found the fruit
while traveling abroad and brought it home with him. He

(04:52):
even hosted tournaments among his neighbors, who like to live
on the edge, to see which of them could grow
the largest tomato. In September are of eighteen twenty, Johnson
trooped down to the courthouse in Salem, New Jersey, to
stand against scientific and religious precedent to defend his favorite snack.
Setting the basket of tomatoes down next to him, he
reached in and, to the horror of the crowd, pulled

(05:13):
out a big, ripe red one. Firmly staring down the
masses who had stopped to watch, Johnson took a bite,
then another, and then another. He consumed the entire basket
while the residents of Salem watched and waited for him
to fall down dead before their eyes. But he didn't,
to the morbid disappointment of his neighbors. Instead, he had

(05:35):
a great time, and the tomatoes reputation began to be rehabilitated.
A couple of years later, tomato recipes would spread across
the United States. While the accounts of the Tomato Trial
of Salem, New Jersey might have been exaggerated, people finally
got the nudge they needed to realize tomatoes are delightful
in any form, And then, of course, it was up

(05:55):
to the cooks to uh catch up with the times.
Some inventions are so successful they change the way we speak.

(06:16):
When we have a cold and need to blow our nose,
we don't ask for a tissue. We ask for a kleenex.
And if we cut ourselves on a knife in the kitchen,
we don't reach for an adhesive bandage. We grab a
band aid, even when that may not be the brand
we have on hand. That's how important certain creations are
to the zeitgeist. But one such invention isn't tied to
a particular brand or a company. It stands alone as

(06:39):
an achievement all on its own. It's been widely considered
the best thing since well. Ever, bread is not a
new construct. It's been around in some fashion for roughly
thirty thousand years. However, one man believed that he could
improve upon it in a unique way. His name was
Otto Frederick row Vetter from Davenport, Iowa, or in eighteen eighty.

(07:00):
Otto was a jeweler and an optometrist, but was always
tinkering with something on the side. He used the skills
that he picked up making and repairing jewelry to invent
all sorts of other new machines. One such device was
designed to do something people were already doing on their
own in their kitchens. However, Otto's contraption would remove all
of the efforts and sliced fingers from the equation. He

(07:22):
wanted to build an automatic bread slicer, and Otto went
all in. He sold all of the jewelry stores that
he owned to pay for the research and development necessary
to build it. A prototype was constructed around nineteen twelve,
but after a fire wiped out both the machine and
its blueprints in nineteen seventeen, his progress was set back
a number of years. Then in nine seven he cracked

(07:45):
the problem and developed a machine that not only sliced
a loaf of bread into equal portions, but wrapped it
as well. It was immediately patented, and by the summer
of the following year, the first loaf of sliced bread
hit the shelves. The machine itself was manufactured and mass
allowing bakeries and grocers to slice and sell their own bread.
For homemakers, which were mostly women at the time, it

(08:08):
meant no more sharp knives and doctors visits to have
stitches put in. Life had been made just a little
bit easier. Sliced bread became a staple of kitchens everywhere
for the next fifteen years, thanks to the popularity of
Wonder Bread sold by the Continental Baking Company. In However,
the slicing came to a halt as America entered World

(08:28):
War Two. The war effort meant all sorts of materials
such as rubber and nylon were collected for making airplane wings, uniforms,
and tank treads. Food also became scarce as civilians sent
what they could to the troops overseas. Rationing was soon
implemented across the country. The lack of butter and sugar
led to the creation of unique cakes baked with all

(08:50):
kinds of ingredients substituted in. Boiled raisins were used instead
of sugar, while vinegar was swapped in when there wasn't
enough flour, but one color. A re creation that took
a hit was sliced bread. In fact, automatically sliced bread
wasn't just kept off the shelves, it was outlawed. The
head of the War Foods Administration, Claude Wickered, believed that

(09:12):
not slicing the bread would save on wax paper usage,
and no sliced bread meant no more automatic slicing machines,
which required large amounts of steel to manufacture. Well. To
the people stuck at home making meals for their families
and already dealing with all kinds of restrictions, the sliced
bread band was a step too far. Letters started pouring
into newspapers and magazines from the women responsible for getting

(09:35):
their children and spouses out the door in a timely manner.
Having to slice upwards of forty pieces of bread a
day took too long and left them prone to mishaps
with the knife. In addition, Mayor LaGuardia of New York
City told bakeries with automatic slicers that they could keep
using them despite the ban. This put the city's bakeries
at odds with each other, since many did not own

(09:55):
their own slicers, all in all, the National Sliced Bread
Band only last did a few months. Ben was officially
killed on March eight of nine. Giving up stockings and
wire hangars were one thing, but having to slice one's
own bread that would go down in history as an
idea that had never been fully baked. I hope you've

(10:20):
enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe
for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the
show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was
created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works.
I make another award winning show called Lore, which is
a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can

(10:42):
learn all about it over at the World of Lore
dot com. And until next time, stay curious.